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App helps tell your colourful pills apart

By Douglas Heaven

EVER wondered if you’ve popped the right pill? Now there’s an app to help. There are thousands of prescription pills but few colours and shapes to choose from, which can lead to dangerous mix-ups, especially in hospitals.

To help prevent such errors, Jesus Caban at the US National Institutes of Health and colleagues have developed software that can identify a pill from a phone camera image. Websites such as Drugs.com and WebMD have tools to help distinguish between pills but you have to type in a description, making these services too time-consuming to use in a clinical setting.

Caban’s software extracts the shape, colour and imprint of a pill from its image and identifies the drug with 91 per cent accuracy in less than a second. Future accuracy will be improved when the system learns to recognise a pill from a wider range of angles. The technique is also simple enough to work as a smartphone app so could be used at home.

The team tested the system on images of 568 of the most prescribed pills, taken from different angles and in a range of lighting conditions. They present the work at the International Conference on Image Processing in Orlando, Florida, this month.